A common practice in the metal building industry has been to make buildings using rigid steel or wooden frames, and to cover these frames with galvanized steel sheet or painted steel or aluminum sheet. This sheet is rolled to various profiles for stiffening effect, aesthetics, or to facilitate the joining of adjacent cover sheets to each other. These metal buildings have been traditionally designed and fabricated in-plant as kits for complete buildings of a specified dimension, then packaged and shipped to the distributor and ultimately the end user where the parts are finally assembled at the job site. This assembly process requires heavy cranes to erect relatively heavy steel frames and hundreds of hours to screw fasten the metal sheets onto the purlin structures of these frames.
Some of the disadvantages of these prior building practices are that the ultimate user must often order the building well in advance of installation, must absorb high costs in packaging, shipping, insurance as well as final assembly. Nor do these prior practices provide any opportunity for changes in the final dimension or size in the building. Once ordered, the user cannot readily change an original choice.
With regard to earlier building practices, Gross U.S. Pat. No. 586,658 shows a sheet metal ceiling wherein two sections of sheet metal having formed edges are seamed or joined together with a hangar sheet which is itself nailed to a wooden ceiling joist or the like.
Schroyer U.S. Pat. No. 3,312,028 discloses generally channel-shaped panels used on both ceiling and roof structures.
Curran U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,608,267 and 3,557,511 disclose the use of two panels connected together with one panel being provided with an additional web formed as extension of one side wall to form a structural floor.
In earlier patents having the same inventor as the present application a building disclosed therein offered alternatives to many of the above mentioned problems of the rigid-frame pre-engineered building. This building system is identified as K-SPAN and is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,842,647, 3,902,288, 3,967,430, 4,505,084 and 4,505,143. This building has curved metal panels roll formed at the job site, seamed together and placed upright to form round profile buildings of medium span.